Chinese hackers may rank high on the military’s list of enemies — but back in Washington, they sometimes double as one of the Pentagon’s greatest political assets.

A steady stream of cyberattacks targeting everything from U.S. weapons systems to corporate trade secrets has provided the Defense Department’s brass with new political fodder to hammer government contractors and press for more money and tools on Capitol Hill.

The latest wrinkle: A newly leaked portion of an independent Defense Science Board report that already had found significant weaknesses in the country’s digital defenses. The once-“confidential” document, first obtained Tuesday by The Washington Post, reveals that key weapons systems may have been compromised by sophisticated Chinese hackers.

It’s not clear whether any designs have been stolen — and it’s just as unclear whether the porous Pentagon itself leaked the report just before Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel is set to meet with Asian counterparts at a forum where cybersecurity will be Topic A. Nevertheless, the revelations Tuesday offer the Pentagon more ammunition that could prove beneficial as Congress prepares to mark up its annual defense policy bill.

To be sure, the cybersecurity threat is significant and growing. A controversial report by private security firm Mandiant, for example, tied a series of cyber attacks on U.S. businesses directly to the Chinese military. Many of those incidents focused on corporate trade secrets.

And Mandiant’s top security official, Richard Bejtlich, last month said at an event that Chinese hackers even have adapted new methods since the firm released its initial findings. It was another sign, he said, about the need for increased vigilance.

Fearing the consequences on the military and intelligence establishments, U.S. leaders now are trying harder than ever to improve the country’s digital defenses. But correcting the cybersecurity course of the entire defense establishment is neither easy nor cheap. Rather, it’s required the Pentagon to play some behind-the-scenes offense, as it seeks to incubate changes among reticent contractors and jumpstart a miserly Congress.

“It’s not to diminish the validity or the concerns” at DoD about the threats, explained Trey Hodgkins, senior vice president of global public sector government affairs at TechAmerica, of the Pentagon’s work. “But they’re as good as anyone else in the political process.”

At the helm: Gen. Keith Alexander, the dual head of U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency. Alexander is among a parade of military salesmen who have spent many months using China to make the case for significant increases in the department’s cyber capabilities and budget.

The top general held classified briefings about the threat on Capitol Hill, for example, as the House prepared to move legislation that would help the government and private sector share cyber data. And Alexander earlier this year took to congressional hearings to reveal once-secret CyberCom plans to hire thousands of new cyber workers — some on offensive teams. That testimony came not long before Obama proposed raising cybersecurity funds in his 2014 plan to $4.7 billion.

There’s as much choreography outside of the legislative process — and new details Tuesday from the Defense Science Board’s secret, independent report quickly prompted the Pentagon to mobilize. Its next move: Make clear that the Chinese threat, however significant, hasn’t rendered an entire generation of military hardware obsolete.

A spokesman for Hagel said the Defense Department still has “full confidence in our weapons platforms.”

“The Department of Defense takes the threat of cyber espionage and cyber security very seriously, which is why we have taken a number of steps to increase funding to strengthen our capabilities, harden our networks, and work with the defense industrial base to achieve greater visibility into the threats our industrial partners are facing,” the spokesman said.

More quietly, however, a defense official told POLITICO the platforms identified by the DSB as being under siege are “are highly complex and rely on integrating information from a number of developers, manufacturers, and operators” — a nod to what the Pentagon sees as a long journey ahead to get its contractor community up to speed, a process that the same defense official said had been well underway.

Separately, an unnamed Pentagon spokesman more explicitly told the Post on Tuesday that cyber intrusions across the defense industrial base remain a significant concern.

A similar split in message emerged last month, when the focus was Lt. Gen. Christopher Bogdan’s testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee on the long stalled F-35 Lightning II. Bogdan invited controversy when he said that the Pentagon had good cyber-defenses, but that he was “less confident about industry partners” at securing key components of the aircraft from cyberattacks.

“I would tell you I’m not that confident outside the department,” Bodgan said during a short exchange.

DOD later walked back his remarks — but the point had been made.

One of the most affected companies is Lockheed Martin, which had several of its systems named as targets in the Defense Science Board report, including its already embattled F-35.

A spokeswoman Tuesday wouldn’t discuss the details of the hack but defended its strategy against cyberattacks. “Lockheed Martin has made significant investments in countering cyber security threats and we remain confident in the integrity of our robust, multi-layered information systems security,” she said.

To that end, it’s still difficult to determine exactly what Chinese hackers actually were able to obtain — and whether just vacuuming up data necessarily constitutes a threat.

“You can get schematic drawings from any of these weapons, but that’s not the same thing as understanding how to build them,” said Loren Thompson, a defense industry consultant.

In the meantime, though, Thompson predicted DoD’s reaction could “cause tensions between the military and the industry.”

Indeed, the real battlefield might be Washington itself, as the House and Senate begin work on the 2014 defense reauthorization. The House Armed Services Committee is far ahead of its counterpart, which hasn’t released any NDAA text for the 2013 debate.

Last year’s bill included a controversial requirement that private industry holding sensitive U.S. intelligence secrets report any cyber breaches — a Senate-driven creation that’s in its early stages of implementation.

The 2014 measure, for now, includes new checks on the work at CyberCom, which many believe is trying under Alexander’s leadership to become a full fledged unified command. CyberCom would not comment for this story.